[Haskell-cafe] Re: Ubuntu and ghc

[Ketil Malde]

Achim Schneider <barsoap at web.de> writes:

Caveat: I have only a vague grasp on what exactly is being criticized
here - using a modern Linux distribution, tons of packages are
available, and almost all issues Claus point out seem to be taken care
of - at least as far as I can see.

> Well, then there are developers who don't want to do .ebuilds, .rpms
> for 20 distributions, .debs for 20 distributions, .cabs... Meaning that
> if you have a project with 5 developers using 3 1/2 distributions, you
> will have a hard time installing.

I think you should either require your developers to use the system
that is provided to them, or be able and willing to maintain their own
system.  Most large Linux distributions seem to come with lots of
Haskell-related stuff nowadays - 139 packages on my Ubuntu install
(divide by something close to 3, as most library stuff comes in -dev,
-doc and -prof variants).

> You have a point, though, and I wouldn't mind at all cabal-install
> being integrated into portage,

I'm not too familiar with portage, but I think a better solution is to
provide tools to automatically generate packages for the various
systems.  How would you specify dependencies on non-haskell components
in a portable way?

> Aren't there any usable third-party package managers for windoze?

The most usable one I've seen is Steam from Valve, IIRC.  It'd be cool
if Haskell packages were provided this way.

> Maybe gentoo should start to do binary releases, too, superseding
> debian and any other distribution.

Yeah, that'll happen. :-)

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants